Mollified with mince, she put her family to rights. Martha was beddit side by side with Blackeyes, who fell asleep with one swarthy arm curved round her middle.
The newcomers were Dussie, Madge, and Jim. In August the elder children went to school again. Soon it was dark by supper-time, then by the closing of afternoon school. Winds were up. Mornings of naked frost changed to afternoons of black and sullen rain. There were nights when the darkness blared and eddied round the thatch and sang in the chimney; white nights, all sky, with the moon riding overhead and round her half the heaven swirling in an enormous broch; moonless nights when Orion strode up-valley and the furred and fallen leaves glistered on the silken roads.
The children saw nothing of these night festivities. They were jammed together in the huddled kitchen, under the smoky and flaring lamp. But one evening Geordie, from the open house-door, whence a guff of caller air flapped through the stifling kitchen, called the girls out to the night.
At Geordie’s call, Dussie was up on the instant. Martha came reluctantly, stooping back over the table to add another stroke to her map.
Outside, after the flare of the lamp and the burnish of firelight, they stepped into a bewildering January dark. Bewildering, because not really dark. Their eyes accustomed to it, they found it was a dark that glowed. No moon; infrequent stars; but when Geordie led them round the end of the house they saw the north on fire. Tongues of flame ran up the sky, flickered, fell back in the unstable pools of flame that gathered on the horizon, rose to crests again and broke into flying jets. The vast north was sheeted in light; low down and black, twisted firs, gnarled, shrunken, edged the enormous heaven. The Merry Dancers were out.
A shudder ran over Martha. Something inside her grew and grew till she felt as enormous as the sky. She gulped the night air; and at the same time made a convulsive little movement against her father. She was not afraid; but she felt so out of size and knowledge of herself that she wanted to touch something ordinary.
‘Some feart kind, are ye?’ said the ploughman, taking her hand tight in his own. Dussie clung to his other hand, rapping his knuckles, waggling his fingers, stroking his leg, sneaking a supple hand in his trouser pocket, all the while that she made lively comment on the sky. Geordie and Dussie had half a dozen private finger games before Martha had had enough of gazing upon the light.
It was Dussie who put the eager questions Geordie could not answer.
‘Weel, I dinna richtly ken fat they micht be. They ca’ them the Northern Lichts. Fireflaughts.’ Then an ancient memory stirring (a rare occurrence with Geordie), ‘I min’ fan I was a laddie there was a bit screed I used to ken. It was some like the geography, Matty, gin I could get a haud o’t. Arory … arory … bory … syne there was a lassie’s name on till’t. Fat div ye ca’ yon reid-heided craiturie o’ Sandy Burnett’s?’
‘Alice,’ said Matty.
‘Ay, ay, that’s the very dunt. Arory-bory-Alice. Weel. Noo, Matty, fat is there a’ roun’ Scotland, lassie?’
‘The sea,’ said Matty, ‘a’ the way roun’, except faur there’s England.’
Geordie stood so long considering it that Martha grew impatient. She was jumping up and down against his hand in her excitement.
‘An’ fat aboot the Arory-bory-Alices, faither?’
‘Weel, I canna get a richt haud o’t,’ said Geordie deliberately, ‘but it gaed some gait like this: On the sooth o’ Scotland there’s England, on the north the Arory-bory − Burnett’s lassie, the reid-heided ane − Alice; on the east − fat’s east o’t?’
‘The sea,’ said Martha, turning eastward, where a span of sea, too dull a glint under the Dancer’s light to catch an ignorant eye, notched their eastern view.
‘Weel, aye, but it wisna the sea. It was something there was a hantle mair o’ than that.’ Geordie’s thoughts, like Martha’s, glanced upon their private notch of sea. ‘I some think it was the sun − the risin’ sun. Ay, fairly. That’s fat it was. Noo, the wast. Fat’s wast o’ Scotland, Matty?’
‘The sea,’ said Martha again.
‘It’s nae that, though, i’ the bit rhyme. It was a bigger word nor that.’
‘Ye cud ca’t the ocean − that’s a bigger word,’ suggested Dussie.
‘It’s the Atlantic Ocean,’ Martha said.
Geordie could get no further with the boundaries of Scotland: but his assertion of the northward edge was too obvious at the moment to be doubted. They stood on Scotland and there was nothing north of them but light. It was Dussie who wondered what bounded Scotland when the Aurora was not there. Neither Martha nor Geordie had an answer.
Some weeks later Geordie had a shaking and shuffle of excitement in the middle of the kirk. He nudged Martha with signs and whispers she could not understand. She held her eyes straight forward and a prim little mouth, pretending not to see or hear. It was dreadful of her father to behave like that in church. Once out on the road again,
‘Yon’s the wordie, Matty − fat’s the meenister was readin’ aboot. Eternity. That’s fat wast o’ Scotland. I mind it noo.’
Martha said it over and over to herself: Scotland is bounded on the south by England, on the east by the rising sun, on the north by the Arory-bory-Alice, and on the west by Eternity.
Eternity did not seem to be in any of her maps: but neither was the Aurora. She accepted that negligence of the map-makers as she accepted so much else in life. She had enough to occupy her meanwhile in discovering what life held, without concerning herself as to what it lacked.
She repeated the boundaries of Scotland with the same satisfaction as she repeated the rivers in Spain. Up to her University days she carried the conviction that there was something about Scotland in the Bible.
The Merry Dancers danced in storm.
Huge galleons of cloud bore down upon the earth, their white sails billowing on the north horizon. Swiftly their glitter and their pride foundered in a swirl of falling snow. The air was darkened. The sun crept doubtfully back to silence. Shifty winds blew the road bare and piled great wreaths at corners and against the dykes. An unvarying wind chiselled knife-edged cornices along the wreaths. Thaw blunted them, and filled the roads with slush. Rain pitted the slush and bogged the pathways.
The children went to school through mire. There was no scolding now for mucky garments; boots were clorted and coats sodden and splashed. Their ungloved hands were blue and swollen with chilblains.
There was east in the spring. Summer winds tumbled the sky. Dykesides smelt of myrrh and wild rose petals were transparent in the July rain.
Dussie and Martha were each a year older. So was Madge. She was not communicative. Her conversation was yea and nay − except to Geordie, and her own small brother Jim, to both of whom she would occasionally impart much astonishing information. Geordie received it with composure, Jim with fists or chuckles according to the edge of his appetite.
In August Mrs. Ironside brought home another baby boy.
One result of this was that Madge, who because she took frequent colds had hitherto slept in the unfreshened kitchen, was sent to share the west room with the other girls. Dussie and
